


Assignment "Crayon Friendship Monstrosity"

by chameleonCharisma



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, High School, Post-Sburb/Sgrub, art class, implied PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-02
Updated: 2015-05-02
Packaged: 2018-03-26 18:22:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3859987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chameleonCharisma/pseuds/chameleonCharisma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What the fuck do you care about rainbows.</p><p>You are Dave Strider and you really shouldn't have taken Rose's advice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Assignment "Crayon Friendship Monstrosity"

The art teacher (whose name you still don’t remember) tells your class that the first assignment he has for you is “a rainbow”. He has explained previously, in sordid detail, that you are all expected to take his assignment “key phrase” and put your own _spin_ on it. (He here made an awkward hand gesture that you fucking wish had been ironic.) Well, you think, Dave Strider never backs down from a challenge. He will spin this shit into next week. He is the master, nay, the _king_ of ironic bullshit spinning and mad raps and he will spin this shit so hard Dorothy will no longer be in Kansas anymore when he is done.

The mental image of a house landing on a witch with red shoes is an unpleasant shock to your system, though, and your brain stutters to a stop like a skipping disc. It’s been hard to think about a lot of things lately. You can’t help but wish you had your phone or something on you. You try to chill out and refocus on the task at hand.

…God, what the fuck do you care about rainbows.

You’re all allowed to move around the room (“to better spark your creativity” or some shit), so you poke around the tables and see what other people are doing. Damn. Most of these guys are just Bob Ross-ing it up in here; little bushes and puffy clouds with reading-fucking-rainbows across the sky. This is stupid. This class is stupid. Why did you even take Rose’s advice.

The teacher notices you and your coolkid apathy about rainbows wandering the classroom, and pulls you aside. Asks if you’re having trouble with the topic. You state for the record that you can only make rainbows so ironic before they take a Mobius loop back into clichéd and stupid. He tells you to think outside the box a bit more. That you can take any part of the spectrum and play around with it. He might have said more, but the word “spectrum” resonates so hard with you, you think Jade might have to put you back together from the atoms on up.

You nod vaguely and head over to the supply shelf; not too fast, not too slow, just cool, calm, completely chill, heart rate normal, totally not about to go out of your damn mind if you don’t put this sickening jumble of whatever the fuck is in your chest all of a sudden to paper.

You grab the communal bucket of crayons (everyone else is using paint or stupid anime markers, trying to be all highbrow and artistic), trying not to think of incestuous slurries and failing miserably as you start digging for very specific colours.

You find a vibrant yellowy-orange first and almost drop it. You set it aside carefully. Lavender and lime come next, followed by bubblegum pink and olive green; bronze, burgundy, mustard yellow. Holy fuck there are so many blues, and you pray that there are all the ones you need. You use scrap paper to test each and every one, and you find them all, slowly but surely. Deep, strong indigo; spider cerulean; bright sky, and true, leaderly blue. You almost tip the fucking bucket over when you find the perfect shade of teal.

More greens and purples come next; jade, violet, fuchsia, forest, and a deep, dark grape. Grey is next; more of a warm one than a cool one is appropriate, you think. You then finally dig around for red. Bright cherry candy red. There’s a perfect one near the bottom of the bucket once you scrape away all the other colours' smears.

You grab a new, untouched sheet of paper and start to draw. You have to restart several times, tracing careful symbols, lingering over Terezi, Karkat, everyone. You know the damn zodiac by heart. John and Jane’s stupid ghosts are harder, not to mention how badly your hands twitch over Jake’s skull, and which of Jade’s to even use, there are so many. You draw a perfect broken record and then cock up again on that stupid orange hat. You start blocking in colours, try and fill the whole page in a way that would make a certain blind alien girl proud. You fuck it up a couple more times trying to get all the lines to match up right. You have wax under your nails and grimed into your palms.

But finally you are done.

And when you look up as the bell rings –

Wow, this is not your fucking class.

You realize that you have been scribbling like a fucking moron for more than two hours and it is now time for lunch.

The art teacher comes up to you as the room empties and asks if you’re alright. Distantly, you are very thankful at this moment for your shades. You cannot summon enough cool in the world to be chill about this. In fact, you are pretty sure you might be shaking. (How the hell do _you_ lose time?) You very calmly and detached-ly tell him no, not especially. You apologize numbly for whatever the hell you did, because you actually aren't sure. You aren't even sure what class you just skipped doing it.

But he waves it off and says he sent a note ahead to your second period teacher and not to worry about it. Then he hands you a blank sketchbook, a simple eight-and-a-half-by-eleven spiral notebook job. Tells you that if you feel like this again you should draw in it, and you take that to mean _not_ the shitty, ironic, wrong-handed comics you doodled on the first day for intro-assignment “get to know me”.

And then you realize that the horrible, claustrophobic and about-to-burst feeling in your chest is gone, that even some of the horrible fuzzy unreal-ness from after everything ended has receded, at least for a little while, and it’s all over the papers in front of you instead.

Wow. That is actually a lot of fucking paper. You vaguely recall getting up for more at some point. You think maybe you should give your ecto-sister more credit. Maybe you were pretty fucked up after all was said and done, though you still think her insistence on exactly what type of fucked up is bullshit. Maybe.

You shuffle the papers into a neater pile. He doesn't say anything, seems to understand that you are trying to regain your damn composure. He gestures to the finished, non-cocked-up motherfucking masterpiece of Crayola perfection on top of the pile. Traces the exacting circle of symbols you've drawn without touching them. Asks, quietly, who they are, and you are damn sure he does not mean astrologically-speaking. Your throat locks up and you’re not sure how to answer his question without either freaking out or sounding like a complete fucking whackjob. “Friends” is what you manage, finally. You congratulate yourself on a job well done keeping your traitorous voice from its painfully uncool shaking. He nods.

You wonder, briefly, as you gaze around the room (certainly not to avoid looking at him, but just because you are completely coolkid-bored with this) if the name “Lalonde” means anything to him. You then wonder how the fuck you have managed to not see the framed psychology degree hanging above his desk at any point this week. You instead wonder if your art teacher’s name means anything to Lalonde. You are the most observant headcase. It’s you.

 _Jegus_ but you are the uncoolest of uncool kids right now. Egbert would laugh himself sick. 

You ask, with something approaching bitter humour, if he gets a lot of crazies in his art classes. Instead of answering, he goes to the supply shelf and hands you some kind of spray can. He tells you it’ll keep the crayon from smearing. As he walks away, he also tells you that students are allowed to bring headphones to class.

You spray and stash the spectacular crayon cacophony in a drying rack and head out for lunch. You take the sketchbook.

The first thing you do after downing your awful cardboard cafeteria pizza is open Pesterchum and accuse Rose Lalonde of being the worst kind of manipulative bitch, and state that she owes you trauma-coffee the next time you meet up. You check your messages. Some new animated coolkid .gif from TZ. Something from John about how school is draining his will to live. Another round of weird horse jams from Equius. And a message from Karkat about how you’d all best be expecting an “alien invasion” in the coming year, along with several choice insults involving various genitalia and everything being on fire. You take out a black pen and start doodling crows in your new sketchbook.

You think that when the bell rings, instead of heading off to gym or math or whatever you have scheduled for today, you’re going back to the art room. You don’t have your camera on you, which is definitely something you’ll need to remedy, but your iPhone does have a delightfully and ironically shitty camera app, with delightfully and ironically shitty lens effects. You are going to snap a picture of that stupid crayon friendship monstrosity and send out a mass text. Sitting at the cafeteria table as a hundred conversations buzz around you, wondering how hard it would be to work in a carapace black or firefly gold, you suddenly feel like you understand everything. Maybe you'll wear one of your suits tomorrow. You wonder how the administration feels about chalk.

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this sitting around for like two weeks, but I've been hemming and hawing about posting it anywhere. I only started reading Homestuck at the end of March, mostly by accident, but I know when I'm hooked. This is the first thing I've written in about four years.  
> I've got a couple more ideas kicking around for this weird little world, so we'll see where it ends up.  
> 


End file.
